Archive for November, 2017

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Oct. 25 that it is looking for ways to ensure that faith-based and religious groups are not blocked from receiving HHS funding for their programs.

In 2003, prolific composer, professor and priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis Father Michael Joncas was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system. He wrote about the experience in “On Eagle’s Wings: A Journey Through Illness Toward Healing,” released last month by Twenty-Third Publications. The Catholic Spirit interviewed him by email. The responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Catholic universities need to study the root causes of forced migration and ways to counter the discrimination and xenophobic reactions it provokes in so many traditionally Christian nations, Pope Francis said.

This year, the Office of Vocations has chosen as its theme, “Pray to the Lord of the Harvest,” a direct reference to the words of Jesus telling his disciples, “The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest” (Lk 10:2). Jesus does not make this as a suggestion, but rather a command that we ask, or pray “to the master of the harvest” for more laborers.

Parliament would be sending a “disturbing message” to Canada’s religious community if it eliminates a law that currently makes it an offense to disrupt a religious service, Cardinal Thomas Collins told a parliamentary committee.

Calling the mass shooting in a Texas Baptist church Nov. 5 an “act of senseless violence,” Pope Francis asked the local Catholic archbishop to convey his condolences to the families of the victims and to the injured.

Father Solanus Casey and two of his brothers made an unusual threesome as they walked together at the College St. Thomas in St. Paul in the summer of 1937: He and Father Maurice Casey wore brown Capuchin Franciscan habits while Father Edward Casey donned the black clerics of an archdiocesan priest.